Malta: “The Mediterranean’s best kept secret”

Some secrets are exciting, filling your heart and your mind with a feel-good factor and with curiosity. And when the secret is a melting-pot of cultures and peoples, words and wisdom,  history and tradition, you just have to kiss and tell. Indeed, this is the driving force behind the campaign launched by the Malta Tourism Authority in its new vision for promoting Malta overseas.

“The Mediterranean’s best-kept secret” is not just a slogan. It is not just the truth, either, but a combination of both that is set to create a new awareness of our Jewel in the Mediterranean island nation.

There is synergy from different factors flowing seamlessly together to create a perfect blend of savvy, bling, and the necessary customer care that will gear the whole package towards a steady rise in the number of tourist arrivals not merely in high season, but throughout the whole year.

Malta is not just sun, sea and sand. It is history and culture, a unique Navel of the World where one finds both the oldest free-standing monuments on the planet, but also the newest, sharpest, arts and culture. In between these two extremes lies the rich heritage we have inherited and made ours throughout the centuries.

Malta has been inhabited since around 5200 B.C. when the Neolithic culture was at its zenith. The people and the cultural period of the Stone Age which began around 10,000 BC, left behind them Megalithic structures and polished stone implements.

Our pre-historic megalithic, literally meaning ‘large stones’: structures actually predate the Giza pyramids by a millennium. The builders of Malta’s megalithic structures. the oldest free-standing constructions in the world, managed to do this by quarrying and hewing mega-tonne blocks of Globigerina limestone and jig-sawed them together in perfect alignment with the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. This they did without having any knowledge about the wheel. and without metal tools or even materials such as obsidian or flint

Subsequently, Malta became a colony of the Phoenicians. the ancient maritime country of southwest Asia, which nowadays covers most of modern Syria and Lebanon. These people gave us its alphabet, which was based on symbols for sounds rather than Egyptian-style hieroglyphics or Sumerian and Persian cuneiform.

The Romans overcame Carthage at the end of the Third Punic war, and colonised Malta. We became a self-governing Municipium, the second highest class of Ancient  Roman cities, inferior in status only to the Colonia, and a Foederata Civitas. Malta even has the ultimate accolade of being mentioned in the Bible because during this period, Paul of Tarsus was shipwrecked here, in AD60.

Between the 4th and 9th century, Malta was part of the Byzantium Empire. Malta was subjugated by the Arabs in AD 879 after being sacked by the Vandals. The Arabs introduced cotton, a staple commodity at the time, and also citrus fruits. They set up irrigation systems and influenced our vernacular. which has both Romance and Semitic roots.

From 1091, there followed a succession of rulers – the Normans, the Angevins, the Hohenstaufens, and the Aragonese. These established Maltese nobility, with some titles that are still extant today. In fact, the oldest traceable title is ‘Barons of Djar Il-Bnlet and Buqana‘.